Stain of Midnight

by Cassandra Moore

  “That’s— Complicated.” Her brows knit together.

  His throat tightened. “Complicated? Are they alive?”

  “Yes.” No hesitation there. “They’re alive. Some of them are worse for the wear, but the wounds should heal. It’s the magic I’m worried about.”

  He thought of the shadowy stain on Noah’s chest, where the shadow wolf had clawed him. The memory of his best friend losing a fight against the vampire’s control wouldn’t leave him anytime soon. “How bad is it?”

  Her lips flattened into a thin line, grim and not at all comforting. “Everyone who was with you is tainted,” she said in the measured, even voice of a doctor delivering dire news. “Some worse than others. Dani and Noah have it the worst. They all survived the attack on Kiplinger’s house, but the aftermath’s not pretty.”

  Not pretty. As if they’d trashed a hotel room and come out with hangovers. An understatement of epic proportions, he knew. His imagination tried to fill in the blanks with the worst conclusions it could dredge up. That won’t help anything. Don’t borrow trouble. You’ve already got the top-of-the-line model. “How about those who weren’t with us? Do you know?”

  “Peter’s been in contact with them. They’re scared and uncertain.” Without appearing to think about it, she reached out to stroke Charlie’s back. “They were scared before, when Noah called for all hands to help take down Kiplinger. Scared, but confident the fighting sorts in the pack would handle it.”

  Cameron’s overworked sense of shame heard enforcer instead of fighting sorts. He shoved the thought away. “We handled part of it, anyway.”

  “You did.” Sonja’s gaze sharpened. “Don’t you start blaming yourself for what happened. You had no way to know about Teresa, let alone what she could do.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yes.” Her hand rested on his, where he’d left it against the dog’s flank. “No one knew about her. If it had just been Kiplinger and his cronies, you had more than enough. If he’d been asleep like you had every reason to expect, you had overkill. Shit happened. Now we have to get a shovel to dig out of it.”

  Practical. Dauntless. Everything he could want in a mate. If only they could save the city’s population of not-quite-normals. And their friends. And themselves. One thing at a time. “Then shoveling it is. Does Peter have the rest of the pack in hand?”

  “As much as he can. Right now, they’ve got no alpha, half the pack is down for the count, the energy here is pretty screwed, and there’s no hope for any of that to change soon.”

  “And all that after the pack changed hands a few months ago,” Cameron added. “The pack hasn’t been what I’d call stable lately.”

  “They’ve run fresh out of big dogs after last night. A handful of them have already decided to get out of the city. Visit relatives, go on vacation. Leave until it’s safe to come back.” Her lips pursed in half a wince. “Peter might have given one or two of those the what-for.”

  “It doesn’t thrill me, either. Instead of sticking around to protect their packmates, they’re tucking tail and fleeing.” Cameron sighed. “But I know who didn’t show up to take down Kiplinger. They’re not bad folks. They’re just not cut out for this kind of thing. They show up to pack functions, run around howling at the full moon, and exchange Secret Santa gifts at holiday time. That’s all they want.”

  “I understand.” Sonja quirked her lips in a rueful smile. “They didn’t sign up for this sort of war.”

  His brow furrowed. “Neither did you, Sunny.”

  “Sure I did. I’ve been signing up for it since I woke you up the other night. Maybe since Kiplinger turned Derek.” A low chuckle escaped her. “It’s a little ironic.”

  “Because you’ve stuck around in this clusterfuck longer than actual pack members?”

  “I purposely stayed clear of pack politics. Pack anything. Now I am square in the center of everything I avoided.” Her eyes danced with contained, rueful humor. “If that isn’t irony, I’m not sure what is.”

  “Pretty sure that’s irony, yep. Not that I’m complaining about it.” As much as he might want her safe, she could take care of herself. Herself and me, too. And I can’t deny I feel better about getting through this with her here. He looked around. “This your place?”

  “It is. I never bring anyone out here, so I figured it was as safe as we could get.” She slid off the bed so she could open the curtains. Afternoon sun flooded the room. Outside the window, he saw only trees, with the Cascades in the distance. No buildings or neighboring homes in sight. “It’s far enough out of town no one will stumble on it, but not too long a drive.”

  With more light in the room, he noticed his hamper shoved over near the closet. “Is that... Is that mine?”

  “Ah. Yes.” She coughed. “We made a quick stop at your place. I didn’t know what clothes in your drawers you actually wore, and we were in a hurry, so I grabbed your dirty laundry. At least those, you’d had on in the recent past. They’re all clean now.”

  “We?” Linen rustled as he eased out of bed. His body ached in a dull reminder of the abuse he’d put it through the night before. His naked body, he noted, washed and still without a stitch on.

  “Peter and me. He’s the one who helped me get all of you out here.”

  “All of us. Noah and Dani? Fuck, you said Dani is still alive, didn’t you?”

  “Barely. Her and Noah, and Kayla and Derek, and everyone else who was at Kiplinger’s. The ones who are just injured are in my spare rooms. The others are...” Her words trailed off.

  He paused in bending over to pick up his clothes basket. “They’re what?”

  “In the kennels.” She winced apologetically. “I have a kennel outbuilding. Part of my grand master plan to start my own dog rescue someday. It’s undignified, but it was what I had to offer. They can’t hurt anyone in there.”

  His stomach knotted. Friends and packmates, stuck in cages because they’d lost control of their inner wolves. No wolf belonged in a kennel, let alone wolves who walked on two legs. But he didn’t know what else Sonja or Peter could have done. He didn’t know what else he could have done, either. I’m damn tired of not knowing how to fix this.

  “You did the right thing,” he said, voice quiet as he carried his laundry to the bed. “We just have to fix it so we can let them out. Peter with them?”

  “When he isn’t taking care of the ones in the guest rooms. He’s pretty adamant about it.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head. Her breasts swung free, a lovely golden brown in the light. Despite the severity of the situation, he couldn’t help but admire them.

  The twitch in his groin reminded him of a basic truth. Men had little control over when their cocks decided to pay attention. Hey, down there. Could you not make me look like an insensitive ass? “Not hard to guess why. Pretty sure he still feels responsible for Regina and Todd’s role in all this. Regina especially.”

  “And he cares about the pack. I think he feels like he let them down.” She stepped over to a wooden bureau to dig a bra out of a top drawer. “I don’t think anyone else feels that way, but it’s going to take him a while to redeem himself in his own eyes.”

  The pair of underwear he pulled out of the basket first had holes. Suddenly, the advice worried mothers gave to children about having on good underwear just in case anyone else had to see them made sense. The second pair, however, looked fine. “I can understand that. You have any ideas how we start fixing this mess?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. A few things struck me as odd.”

  “Just a few?”

  “A couple. Everything else? Totally normal. I bomb basements with flashbangs and magic powder once a week.” She made a face at him as she hooked her bra behind her back. “Let’s start with, how did everyone end up tainted with this shadow shit except you?”

  “Mm. I wondered that, too. I know Noah had it before we went into the house, and Dani told me she’d ended up with it. But no one else had it be
fore we went after Kiplinger.” Bless her, she’d brought his favorite pair of jeans. He pulled them on as they talked. “You said all of them have it now?”

  She nodded to him. “Every last one of them. Even the ones who didn’t appear to have taken any wounds. Everyone except you. You’ve taken wounds both in that confrontation, and in that ambush you mentioned in the morgue. By all rights, you should have it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You look good in black.”

  “Haute couture or no, I don’t want it, but it does seem strange.” It pinged off a memory from the night before. “She told me she’d hoped to meet me since she arrived. That in another time, she would have admired my strength and dedication. But it was a shame she couldn’t finish what she’d begun while I still stood in her way.”

  He could see the thoughts turning behind Sonja’s eyes as she slipped off her sweatpants, and the panties beneath. Neither he nor Sonja could be in the mood just now, not with such an urgent mystery in front of them, but she had beautiful legs. A bonus reason to want all this dealt with as soon as possible. As if I needed more reasons.

  “Before Pirelli’s balls crawled up next to his liver, I got some information from him. He knew Teresa Espina, or knew of her, centuries ago. There are theories she stole an artifact of great power. One with a demon in it. That demon has been trying to regain its corporeal form for a long, long time. It makes promises of power in return for helping it. Pirelli thought Teresa might have taken the bait.”

  “If she did, the demon’s getting impatient. She said she only had so much time left to do what she must.” Cameron flattened his lips. “Sounds to me like she’s out of time.”

  “Diabolism was never my specialty, but I know a little about it,” Sonja said. A pair of panties dangled from her hand, forgotten in her thoughts.

  “What don’t you know a little about?”

  “Quantum field theory.”

  “Me, either.”

  She chuckled and pulled on her underpants. “Nice to know I’m not alone. Anyway, demons are more neurotic about putting limits on their deals than humans are. A human might make a deal out of generosity. Demons never do. They intend to come out of every arrangement ahead of where they started. It’s the first rule of dealing with them. ‘Always expect the demon is trying to screw you over.’“

  “Thought that was mattress salesmen.”

  “There is a disturbing amount of overlap between people trying to sell you a bed and demons looking to deal.” Sonja looked wry and glanced towards her bed. “Next time, I’m buying online. But if Pirelli was right, Teresa made her deal with this big, bad demon centuries ago. That’s a long time for a demonic agreement.”

  “So let’s assume that Teresa’s desperate. Her interest-free power loan period is coming to an end, and diabolic compounding interest is too rich for her blood.” Cameron dug a shirt out of his laundry. “It’s pretty obvious she needs certain conditions to succeed. You said she’s corrupting the ley lines coming out of the mountain.”

  “I’m almost positive of it. She went to a lot of trouble to set up that magic at Glenn’s house and keep it there. And...” She tapped one temple. “You dreamed it before. The rivers of bright power getting choked by shadowy shit.”

  “Which brings us right back to me. Her whole attitude changed when she found out I was the pack enforcer. She said...” He tried to recall the exact quote. “‘The guardian. I have hoped to meet you since I arrived.’“

  “So it isn’t you. It’s your position in the pack.”

  “Way to make a guy feel special, Sunny,” he said, but the line of thought distracted him. “I think you’re right. When I said I was the enforcer...”

  “The guardian. Which could have some pretty big implications. If she can’t do what she needs to with you in her way-”

  “-then I’m guarding what she’s trying to take. Think it’s my baseball card collection?”

  “You have a baseball card collection?”

  “No.”

  “Probably not that, then. I always think better on a full stomach. Hungry?”

  At the mention of food, his stomach rumbled. He looked down at it. “That’s a yes. We have anything to eat here?”

  “Eggs and toaster waffles.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Just now, everything sounded good to him. He might have eaten the tires off a car, if someone put a little maple syrup on them.

  Charlie hopped down off the bed to follow them out as Sonja led the way down a hall that could have doubled as a photo gallery. The first one he noticed looked like a wedding picture, a man in a uniform holding hands with a beautiful woman as they exited a small church. In her face, Cameron could see echoes of Sonja’s features, the dark eyes, the gorgeous lips, the shape of her jaw. The bride clutched a small bouquet of daisies and grinned with a fierce joy he’d never seen on his lover’s face. The groom wore a tiny smile, as if he didn’t prefer to have any expression at all in most cases but couldn’t hold this one back. Cameron noticed the writing on a small wooden sign nearest the church door, but couldn’t read it for lack of studying Spanish in school. What little he could see of the church surroundings didn’t look much like America to him.

  More pictures hung on the walls beyond. Several showed the groom as older man in an Army uniform, posing for formal portraits. Others showed him in fatigues, next to squads of soldiers Cameron assumed the man commanded. He looked severe, stoic, the very image of a man who didn’t know what to do with his emotions but bury them before they rotted and stunk up the area.

  A few showed the man with Sonja. Sonja as a teenager, standing in front of an Egyptian pyramid. She smiled, not so wide as to show teeth. His smile looked more like a forced wince. Sonja as a teenager again, in front of Angkor Wat, the man a dour presence beside her. Teenage Sonja and the man with a kangaroo. With an African elephant. With penguins. On a snowy plain, Mount Denali behind them. Holding a bound crocodile between them. Picture after picture of exotic locales, the solemn-faced man and a teenager of various ages, looking like they wondered what to do about each other.

  “That your dad?” Cameron asked.

  Sonja glanced over her shoulder. “What? Oh, yeah. That’s my father. Colonel Franklin Carter. He’s in Germany for the next six to eight months.”

  Cameron stopped in front of one of the group shots and squinted at it. The bright sun and quantity of sand matched all the shots he’d seen of the Middle East. “Is that Derek?”

  Sonja took a couple steps back to join him. “Yep. Second tour.”

  “You two dated, didn’t you?”

  “For a while. That was taken after we’d broken up.” Sonja continued down the hall, toward the stairs down to what he assumed was the main floor. “Dad sends me pictures of all his commands, if he can.”

  “Was it a little, I dunno, awkward dating a man in your dad’s unit?”

  “Sure was,” she said. Her feet impacted on the first couple steps at some volume.

  I’m thinking it was more than a little awkward. I’m also thinking I’ll stop asking about it. Bad enough to talk about an old flame with a new one. Worse when it sounded like it had taken a train to Discomfort Junction.

  He didn’t try again until they’d gotten down the stairs. “That wedding picture. That was your mom?”

  “It was. Dad met her when he was in Mexico. They got married, and she went with him when the Army moved him.” Her voice softened as she talked about it. “They had me when he got assigned back to the States.”

  The living room had more art on the walls, these less personal. Larger landscapes of the places he’d seen pictured in the hallway, punctuated with smaller photos he assumed Sonja or her father had taken themselves. On the mantle, he noted one professional portrait of Colonel Carter, his wife, and a young Sonja, perhaps six or seven, bright smile showing a mix of baby teeth and their adult counterparts. The rest of the dozen or so pictures displayed there looked like shots of Charlie, from his bumbling puppy days to
a handsome, grown-up dog.

  One picture caught his eye, so he stopped for a better look. A little girl in a Halloween witch’s hat, one with a sunflower pinned at the peak. The dress she wore matched the blue color of the room’s pillows, or did before the photograph faded with time. Most of the time, when Cameron saw children in witch costumes, they wore menacing outfits in dour shades. This child seemed to celebrate the role, to embrace it in the same way the city’s magical practitioners did. Sonja’s mother knelt beside the child, beaming the proudest grin Cameron had ever laid eyes on.

  A slip of paper mounted beneath the photograph read, Mommy’s Little Witch.

  He turned to see Sonja watching him from the head of a hallway. “You were a witch, and so was she,” he said quietly.

  She shrugged. The gesture masqueraded as casual, but Cameron knew better. Tension made the movement abrupt, stiff. “Things change.”

  A thousand questions erupted into his mind. The urge to cross the room so he could hold her smothered them down. But he didn’t. Didn’t ask. Didn’t embrace her. For a too-long moment, they stared across the room at each other, and that heartbeat of hesitation allowed her to build a wall between them. He could feel it looming there, cold and insurmountable. She had too much practice putting it up, and he knew with certainty she would knock him down if he tried to scale it now.

  He cursed himself as she turned away and tried again. “Your mom pass away?” Cameron asked.

  “When I was fourteen.” Her tone had a deceptive flatness to it. It sounded to him like her father’s face looked in the pictures, full of forced neutrality and refusal to show vulnerability. No question where she’d picked that habit up.

  “I’m sorry, Sunny. I wish you’d had more time with her.” He caught up to touch her shoulder.

  She glanced back at him. For a moment, he thought he could see it behind her eyes, the pain and loneliness of losing a beloved parent. The weight of history lurked in the shadow of her gaze, the burden of a past that haunted her even now. Then it was gone, tucked away where no one could hurt her with it. Her melancholy smile tugged his heart. “Thanks. I do, too.”